AFTER THE CONTROVERSIAL EXECUTION OF KENNETH EUGENE SMITH IN JANUARY, WE LOOK AT THE LONG HISTORY OF STATE-SANCTIONED DEATHS IN THE US
On 26 January 2024, Death Row inmate Kenneth Eugene Smith was securely strapped to a stretcher at the Holman Correctional Facility in Alabama. Prison medics placed a gas mask over his face before the nitrogen gas being used to suffocate him was released. According to witnesses, it was not a peaceful death – Smith convulsed violently for nearly half an hour before he died. It had taken 28 years for the convicted murderer’s sentence to be carried out, and while his execution was only one of thousands to have taken place in the United States since the continent was colonised, his death was both noteworthy and controversial.
He had received his sentence for the 1988 murder of 45-year-old Elizabeth Sennett. The wife of a debt-ridden preacher, Elizabeth was beaten and stabbed eight times by Smith and his accomplice John Parker. They had staged the scene to look like a burglary gone wrong but, in reality, they had been paid $1,000 each by Elizabeth’s husband Charles to murder her, so he could collect on her life insurance and resolve his financial problems. Only a few days after the crime, and with the police poised to uncover the deadly plot, Charles died by suicide. Both Smith and Parker were found guilty of murder in 1989. The latter was executed by lethal injection in 2010, but Smith – who admitted breaking into the house, but maintained he had not taken part in the killing – was given life without parole. In 1996, however, a judge overruled the decision and gave Smith the death penalty.
In 2022, Alabama attempted to carry out the sentence, but botched it. The medical team inserted one intravenous line into Smith’s arm in readiness to administer the lethal concoction of drugs, but could not successfully insert the second IV they needed. Smith was given an unscheduled stay of execution. His unexpected luck ran out this year when the state approved the use of pure nitrogen gas to kill him, fatally starving his brain of oxygen in a process called nitrogen hypoxia. It was the first time that anyone in the world had been put to death by this new method.
The execution was the latest milestone in A merica’s long history of state-sanctioned deaths. Critics of the contentious method argued it was unnecessarily cruel, while Elizabeth’s family told reporters 58-year-old Smith had finally “paid his debt” for the killing. “I’ve been to four previous executions and never seen acondemned inmate thrash in the way Kenneth Smith reacted to the nitrogen gas,” said one witness, a local journalist, who had been invited to watch the most recent chapter in the story of capital punishme
